Overview

This chapter intends to analyse patterns of full and reduced forms of 350 occurrences of ‘because’, collected from spoken Bolton (Lancashire) English. These patterns of full and reduced forms can be shown to be a function of the formality of context, the age of the speaker and the pragmatic function of ‘because’. The chapter presents a number of pragmatic/discourse functions of ‘because’ in contemporary English in order to correlate the various forms with the different functions of ‘because’. First, it will be demonstrated that many variants are available to native speakers, and that reduced forms are not consistently more frequent in informal contexts for all speakers: both disyllabic and monosyllabic variants occur in both formal and informal situations for virtually all speakers in the corpus, and it is only with the younger speakers in the corpus that monosyllabic variants predominate, in both contexts. Second, the chapter will demonstrate that younger speakers use ‘because’ in an extended range of pragmatic functions. Finally, it will be shown that both the incidence and the range of meanings of the monosyllabic variant ‘cos’ are related to the age of the speaker: except for the oldest speaker in the data, all speakers used monosyllabic forms of ‘because’, although their frequency increases in younger speakers.

Introduction

This chapter intends to analyse patterns of full and reduced forms of ‘because’ in Bolton (Lancashire) English, as observed in 350 occurrences collected from five hours of semi-guided and free conversations in the corpus of spoken Lancashire English of the PAC programme (Durand and Pukli 2004, Durand and Przewozny 2012, 2015). These patterns of full and reduced forms will be shown to be a function of the formality of context, the age of the speaker and the pragmatic function of ‘because’. While the data can be regarded as relatively small, they are varied enough to make sense of the observable patterns in terms of apparent time changes (Labov 1966, 1972), both as far as the phonological variants of ‘because’ and its pragmatic uses are concerned. The chapter presents a number of pragmatic/discourse functions of ‘because’ in contemporary English in order to correlate the various forms with the different functions of ‘because’.